Posts Tagged ‘ladies and stop turning into porky fatties’

GET cleaning ladies: it’s because you’re porky fatties. And rather than this being the usual misogynist tripe this is actually sound science. There is a real reason for muffin tops and gargantuan bingo wings: it’s that no one is cleaning behind the stove properly any more. Really:

Women, they found, once had been quite physically active around the house, spending, in 1965, an average of 25.7 hours a week cleaning, cooking and doing laundry. Those activities, whatever their social freight, required the expenditure of considerable energy. (The authors did not include child care time in their calculations, since the women’s diary entries related to child care were inconsistent and often overlapped those of other activities.) In general at that time, working women devoted somewhat fewer hours to housework, while those not employed outside the home spent more.

Forty-five years later, in 2010, things had changed dramatically. By then, the time-use diaries showed, women were spending an average of 13.3 hours per week on housework.